Triptych

After - Part I

BASIL PERCIVAL Grey had been given two things by his father. The first was his admittedly horrendous name, which had earned him more than his fair share of scorn in the school playground and the rough teasing of his two older sisters. The name had made Basil defiant from the beginning. It had made him snappish and standoffish in school. Combined with his higher-than-average intelligence and his smug acknowledgement of his superiority to his classmates, Basil had grown up into a right proper snot.

The second thing that Basil's father had given him was imagination. When it seemed that Basil's loud self-importance and brash isolationist tendencies might nurture him into a serial killer or vicious bully, Richard Grey had taken his son aside and handed him H.G. Wells' The War of The Worlds. Basil was stunned and shamed and torn.

Stunned that such intellectual and scientific literature existed, full of stories about people like Basil — smart and keen on science and useful in the saving of worlds. Shamed, because Basil knew that if life out there did exist, then perhaps his own petty behaviour would not be very impressive to any docile or benign visitors that arrived and interacted with him (as they inevitably would, Basil being the pinnacle of intelligence on Earth in these limited childhood fantasies). Torn, because he wanted to be someone worth meeting, but was unsure where the first step on that journey should fall.

Humbled, Basil quickly moved on to Asimov and Shelley. He returned to the comics magazines that he'd scorned in school, and found that they had matured with him and now portrayed at least a lingering pseudo-science. Suddenly the petty territorial squabbles of the playground seemed so inconsequential. So...childish.

Basil and Richard spent long afternoons repairing hobby radios and telling each other stories of the sorts of wonders the future would hold: the technology, the people, the exotic places they would visit on Venus and the moon. Basil quickly found his penchant for verboseness, and the cares of the persecuted schoolyard victim fell by the wayside. All that mattered were the stories, heard, read or told, and afternoons working on the radios with his father.

Not long after that, Richard Grey died in a tunnel accident that could have been prevented had there been an advanced enough communications system in his mine. Basil turned that vast and fantastic imagination onto science. The hobby of tinkering with radios became an all-out obsession with building a better telephone, a faster electric wire, a clearer radio signal. Aliens and spaceships and beings from other worlds still held a place in Basil's heart, but as he forged forward his imagination and creativity were harnessed into technological advancement.

Basil had lost a father, but retained his lifelong love of the fantastic. He rose quickly to the top of his classes, and in university had a penchant for leaping to strange and strangely workable theories before most of his classmates even understood the questions they were being asked to solve. He had a reputation for figuring things out in the most eccentric and science-fictiony way possible — an observation which was meant to be an insult, but which he took as a compliment every time.

And then the Institute had come knocking on his door.

All of which had somehow, in some strange and circular way, led him here. Here and now, to the place where all of it, everything, came together and defined his life in ways that Basil could never have imagined. In ways that mattered.

Or, used to matter, at any rate. Basil tried very hard to feel guilty.

He closed his eyes and stuck out his tongue and concentrated. Nope.

It just wasn't happening. A glance to the side told him that Gwen wasn't feeling particularly repentant either.

Court martialing, firing, whatever; the Institute could terminate or redirect their careers as much as they wanted, could lock them both up until the end of forever. He still wouldn't feel bad for what he'd done.